and do some other stuff too, sometimes

September 21, 2014 — 3:54 PM UTC

Anyway. Anaeax update—chewing through that final rewrite I mentioned a bit ago, a little more than halfway through. I hear tell it’s giving Peter a bunch of ideas, though he’s currently caught up in some other stuff and hasn’t had much time to progress on his side of things. (Neither of us need this game to eat, and we’re currently not considering a Kickstarter, so if it takes another eight years to come out—well, I’m not too worried.)

I’m in a blogging mood today, though, so I figured I’d talk briefly about the scripting layer. Readers of the old blog might remember that the scripting layer was a Rhino-based JavaScript interpreter that used Rhino’s general coolness to talk to the Java APIs inside the game. And that was rad. But we’ve switched tech to Mono for a number of reasons around tooling and platform-friendliness. While .NET has a couple different JavaScript libraries, none proved suitable for what I wanted. I wanted fast script execution but an option for no runtime code generation (which is disallowed on iOS, consoles, and so on).

This is harder than it sounds. JScript.NET requires runtime code generation and just doesn’t run on platforms without Reflection.Emit. Jint is cool and nobody knows about it, but I ran into a lot of trouble trying to make it play nicely with what I wanted—it was also pretty slow.

So I was complaining most vociferously about this to my buddy Sean, who has this habit of being good at things. Sean is a compilers guy, which scares me roughly on the level of “an axe-murdering guy” but in completely different parts of my psyche, and he’d done a bunch of Roslyn reading. (He doesn’t do much .NET, but, y’know. It’s an interest.) “What about using Roslyn to compile your scripts?”

“That’s horrib—wait, that’s brilliant.”

So off I went, code code code, and had something cranked out in a few hours. Not using Roslyn, which is still kind of new, but the (now) old standard, CSharpCodeProvider. (edit 1/2015: this is now Exor, which you can use separate from my game frameworky bits.) Scripts are just C#. On the first startup, Tracksuit (which is open-source, btw, use it in good health and send me pull requests (edit 1/2015: now Clank, itself soon to be open-sourced as well)) walks your mods/assets directories for .cs files and compiles them, caching the results for future runs, and loads them as their own assemblies. There’s some mod-level metadata to define mod dependencies used by the mod compiler to compile dependencies in the proper order and expose them as dependent assemblies to code further down the dependency tree. Attributes declare entry points and object unique IDs for use in other content; I kind of reinvented Mono.Addins in the process but couldn’t quite come up with a good way to reuse that instead of bolting in my own simple assembly-walker stuff (and I didn’t really want to be its new maintainer, either).

This whole approach doesn’t work on iOS, obviously. But that’s not a big deal, because what does work is precompiling the mod projects (all my content .cs files live in a .csproj) and embedding them. Already tested it. Works like a champ. My biggest concern thus far is security, because while .NET supports AppDomain and some security stuff, Mono (Mac and Linux) sure don’t. Then again, Minecraft mods are Java and can do anything they want on the system. There might just have to be some caveatmodtor in there.

My name's Ed, and I run a little devops consultancy; my thing is making other developers better and making the systems I oversee smarter, faster, and more reliable.

But I'm a human first. So I'm more interested in that. Tech is part of but not all of my life, and I'd rather talk to you about books or music or video games than about code or rapid deployment. I sometimes write about those things when they're interesting, but I'm much more into the questions of how we as technologists can be better citizens and contributors to society.

Some friends and I also do some goofy video stuff, which you can find on Twitch and YouTube.